The Last Waltz

Happy birthday Engelbert Humperdinck – 74 today.

Blue Moon

Lorenz Hart would have been 105  115 today.

Did you see the one about. . .

Burning down the house –  David Slack at Island Life nearly did.

10 quirky science tricks for parties – exactly what it says from Peter Griffin at Sciblogs .

We don’t know how lucky we are – Ofsetting Behaviour reminds us that a simple GST is better.

Chicken pop hole – toilet humour at Private Secret Diary.

Does anyone still work in Wellington? – Quote Unquote’s observations on a trip to the capital.

Broad sweeping generalisations – Laughy Kate on visiting the aunts.

Hilarious – Opposable Thumb isn’t amused by comedy festivals.

C.S. Lewis Song

On day two of New Zealand Music Month Brooke Fraser sings C.S. Lewis Song.

Birthday baking falls short of promise

I never know what to give my brother for his birthday but last year I had what seemed like a really good idea – a voucher for a batch of baking every month for the coming year.

September is his birthday month and I started with one of his favourites – Alison Holst’s cathedral window cake.

In October he got Jamaican lime biscuits and in November I delivered a batch of ginger crunch.

December’s delivery was Christmas cakes – yes, cakes plural. Distraction while baking led me to leaving out the sugar in the cathedral window cake. I thought there’d be enough sugar in the fruit to ensure it still tasted okay but gave him another, with sugar, in case it didn’t.

Then we got to January. I was in Wanaka until the 19th. I don’t know where the rest of the month went but it flew by without a batch of baking being delivered. February went even faster and it was March 1 before I dropped off another fruit cake – though I excused that by reasoning that if it had been a leap year or if February was a proper month with at least 30 days I’d have really only been one month late.

And March? Sometimes you can have one of those fortnights this week, March was one of those years that month and baking was low down the list of priorities. Our daughter did some baking and dropped it off to her uncle. But that doesn’t count as part of my gift so I had good intentions of catching up in April.

I made two separate batches of short bread but the baking didn’t coincide with a trip to town and both went over to the office before I had time to deliver them.

I made some ginger buns last week but they too found their way to the office.

Now it’s May, do you think I could get away with emailing him a photo of the next batch of baking instead?

May 2 in history

On May 2:

1194 – King Richard I  gave Portsmouth its first Royal Charter.

1230 William de Braose, 10th Baron Abergavenny was hanged by Prince Llywelyn the Great.

 

1335 Otto the Merry, Duke of Austria, became Duke of Carinthia.

1536 Anne Boleyn was arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason and witchcraft.

1559 John Knox returned from exile to Scotland to become the leader of the beginning Scottish Reformation.

 

1568 Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped from Loch Leven Castle.

1670 King Charles II granted a permanent charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company to open up the fur trade in North America.

 

1729 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was born (d. 1796).

1737  William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was born (d. 1805).

1806  Catherine Labouré, French visionary and saint was born (d. 1876).

1808  Outbreak of the Peninsular War: The people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. Francisco de Goya later memorializes this event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

1808 Emma Wedgwood, English naturalist, wife of Charles Darwin, was born (d. 1896).

 

1816 Marriage of Léopold of Saxe-Coburg and Charlotte Augusta.

 

1829  Captain Charles Fremantle of the HMS Challenger, declared the Swan River Colony in Australia.

 

1863 American Civil War: Stonewall Jackson is wounded by friendly fire while returning to camp after reconnoitering during the Battle of Chancellorsville. 

1866  Peruvian defenders fought off Spanish fleet at the Battle of Callao.

1879  The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party was founded in Casa Labra Pub (city of Madrid) by the Spanish workers’ leader Pablo Iglesias.

1885 Good Housekeeping magazine went on sale for the first time.

 

1885  Cree and Assiniboine warriors won the Battle of Cut Knife, their largest victory over Canadian forces during the North-West Rebellion.

1885 – The Congo Free State was established by King Léopold II of Belgium.

1889 Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, signs a treaty of amity with Italy, which gave Italy control over Eritrea.

1892 Manfred von Richthofen, German World War I pilot – the Red Baron – was born (d. 1918).

1895 Lorenz Hart, American lyricist ws born (d. 1943).

1903 Benjamin Spock, American pediatrician and author was born (d. 1998).

1918 General Motors acquired the Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware.

1932 Comedian Jack Benny‘s radio show aired for the first time.

Jack Benny

1933 – Gleichschaltung: Adolf Hitler banned trade unions.

1935 King Faisal II of Iraq was born (d. 1958).

 

1936 Engelbert Humperdinck, Indian-born singer, was born.

1945 World War II: Fall of Berlin: The Soviet Union announced the capture of Berlin and Soviet soldiers hoisted their red flag over the Reichstag building.

1945 World War II: Italian Campaign – General Heinrich von Vietinghoff signed the official instrument of surrender of all Wehrmacht forces in Italy.

1945 World War II: The US 82nd Airborne Division liberated Wöbbelin concentration camp finding 1000 dead inmates, most starved to death.

 

1946  The “Battle of Alcatraz” in which two guards and three inmates died.

1950 Bianca Jagger, Nicaraguan socialite, was born.

1952  The world’s first ever jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet made its maiden flight, from London to Johannesburg.

1955  Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

1963  Berthold Seliger launched a rocket with three stages and a maximum flight altitude of more than 100 kilometres near Cuxhaven.

1964  Vietnam War: An explosion sank the USS Card while docked at Saigon. 

1964 Tram #252,  displaying the message ‘end of the line’ and with Mayor Frank Kitts in the driver’s seat, travelled from Thorndon to the Zoo in Newtown – the last electric tram journey in New Zealand.

1964 – First ascent of Shishapangma the fourteenth highest mountain in the world and the lowest of the Eight-thousanders.

1969   Queen Elizabeth 2 departsedon her maiden voyage to New York City.

1969 Brian Lara, Trinidadian West Indies cricketer, was born.

1982 Falklands War: The British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano.

 

1994– Bus disaster in Poland, 32 people died.

1995 During the Croatian War of Independence, Serb forces fired cluster bombs at Zagreb, killing 7 and wounding over 175 civilians.

1998  The European Central Bank was founded in Brussels in order to define and execute the European Union’s monetary policy.

1999  Panamanian election: Mireya Moscoso became the first woman to be elected President of Panama.

2000 President Bill Clinton announces that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the United States military.

2000 Princess Margriet of the Netherlands unveiled the Man With Two Hats monument in Apeldoorn and the other in Ottawa on May 11, 2000, symbolically linking the Netherlands and Canada for their assistance throughout World War II.

 

2002 Marad massacre of eight Hindus near Palakkad in Kerala.

2004   Yelwa massacre of more than 630 nomad Muslims by Christians in Nigeria.

2008 Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar killing over 130,000 people and leaving millions of people homeless.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia